Critics of "go local" movements
warn that buying local deprives people in developing countries of jobs
that could lift them out of poverty. But the global economy isn't that
simple.

There's only one thing worse for the poor in the Global South, we're
told, than a job in a sweatshop: It's the alternative -- no job. That's
basically what New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argued recently.
If true, then "buy local" campaigns in the North that cut imports could
harm the planet's poorest people.

But before accepting this heart-rending story, let's ground ourselves
in the real global economy.

Shedding corporate-media filters, we see that the poor are not languishing
in their sad villages and grimy shantytowns just waiting to be saved by
corporate giants from abroad. Many poor people are themselves creating
the real job growth in much of the Global South. They are the small shopkeepers,
street vendors, and home-based workers whose jobs make up what's called
the "informal economy" not counted by authorities.

In Latin America, 85 percent of new jobs created during the 1990s were
in this sector, not the corporate one. Informal jobs account for more than
half of all jobs in Latin America and the Caribbean, and as much as 80
percent in parts of Asia and in Africa.

Many of the jobs the poor are creating are not what the wealthy minority
abroad might imagine -- lone individuals scrambling, say, to power a pedicab
in Dhaka or sell fruit on streets of Caracas.

Millions are working together, through microcredit institutions and
people's movements, to further both economic and social goals. Among the
biggest are Bangladesh's largely self-financing Grameen Bank, BRAC (formerly
the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), and the Association for Social
Advancement, whose combined microloans have gone to roughly 16 million
poor people, mostly women, enabling many to create their own village-level
enterprises.

Grameen -- mostly owned by its borrowers -- reports that more than half
the families of its borrowers have "crossed the poverty line." Assuming
Bangladesh's other two large micro-credit efforts come close to this success
rate, rural Bangladeshis' self-directed initiatives have freed more than
four times as many from poverty as the number employed in export garment
factories, where insecure jobs offer 8 to 18 cents an hour.

Overall, the number of microcredit users worldwide -- many of whom are
creating their own work -- is roughly four times the 23 million people
directly employed by all multinational corporations.

BRAC alone employs almost 100,000 people, not in order to return a profit
to an investor but, as BRAC says, "with the twin objectives of poverty
alleviation and empowerment of the poor." With its members' groups now
in more than 140,000 Bangladeshi village organizations, BRAC is creating
not only health services and schooling but its own small enterprises, too
-- from fisheries to printing to a tissue-culture lab to an iodized salt
plant. They operate mostly for local consumption and are controlled by
BRAC itself.We citizens of the North think of global capital as the only
jobs-generator. But more people in the world are members of cooperatives
-- around 800 million -- than own shares in publicly traded companies.
Many are helping build locally controlled economies. Over the last three
decades, women in India have, for example, built a network of cooperative
dairies raising the incomes of more than 11 million households.Compare
that to the 1 to 2 million jobs created by the high-tech corporate sector
in India.

Worldwide, co-op membership doubled in the last 30 years, according
to the Geneva-based International Co-operative Alliance. In Colombia, the
Saludcoop health care cooperative is the nation's second largest employer,
providing services to a quarter of the population.

And to those who still see global capital as the poor's savior, I am
tempted to respond, "Let's get real!" Even if it were a path to real advancement,
U.S. direct investment in the poorest continent, Africa, is close to zilch
anyway -- representing about 1 percent of all U.S. direct investments abroad.

Benefits for North and South

Relocalizing economies in the North isn't an all-or-nothing proposition.
Importing tropical products like coffee and bananas from the Global South
makes sense, as does importing artisanal goods, linking cultures by spreading
beauty and appreciation of difference. The real challenge is ensuring that
exports don't undermine basic food security and that producers for export
get a fair return.

That means, in part, expanding the FAIR
TRADE MOVEMENT which is already making a huge difference
in the lives of over 1 million farmers and farm workers. It also means
challenging monopoly power among food processors as well as encouraging
more local processing so that a bigger share of the end-value stays in
producer communities. (Today, just a tenth of the value of coffee stays
in coffee-producing countries, down from almost a third of the value just
ten years ago.)

Getting serious about ending poverty in the Global South does not mean
abetting the reach of global corporations. Instead, we can work to remove
the barriers U.S. corporate-driven policies place in the way of thriving
local economies abroad -- policies like NAFTA and U.S. farm subsidies that
have drowned Mexican corn farmers in a flood of subsidized U.S. corn.

In building local, living economies here, we stand shoulder to shoulder
with the citizens of the Global South.